Plextor M5 Pro 256 Gigabyte Review

With the M5Pro, Plextor have an SSD in their portfolio, which is based on a very well performing and well-known controller from Marvell. Other than that Plextor have optimized the firmware towards maximum performance as well as high endurance. With this drive up their sleeve Plextor wants to steal some market share from their competitors and we're certainly curious how well a job the company did. ﻿

Already with their M3Pro Plextor had a
SATA-III SSD in their portfolio, that was able to win the hearts of many
customers. That drive was based on a Marvell 88SS9174 controller and other than
that there was 25 Nanometer MLC NAND. Ever since Plextor offered a very
reasonable mix regarding performance as well as reliability. With the M5Pro the
manufacturer released the successor of the M3Pro and this time, there is a new
controller as well as new NAND flash memory. Taking a closer look at the
controller we find a Marvell 88SS9187. Unfortunately there is no in-depth
information available on this chip. We only know it supports SATA 3.1 and
therefore queued TRIM as well as mSATA. In case of the NAND Plextor is buying 19
Nanometer MLC Toggle NAND from Toshiba, which offers about 3'000 P/E-cycles. A
closer look at the PCB reveals there also is a 512 Megabyte DDR3 cache. Overall
this sounds like a resonable combination and we'd expect rather decent
performance from this drive, since Plextor is well-known to have a capable
firmware team.

A quick look at the bundle shows, there is a 3.5 inch adapter as well as a
serial number to download a copy of Acronis Disk Image.